Comment ccNSOAG7:

["Stephan Welzel/Denic" <welzel@xxxxxxxx>]

On behalf of DENIC, the registry for .de, I submit
the following comments on the ccSO Assistance
Group's Preliminary Recommendation on ccSO
Structure:

Since it deals with rather obvious issues
concerning transition, the Recommendation does not
provoke any basic disagreement. However, two of
its notions require further consideration:

Firstly, it seems rather unpracticable to ask of
membership applicants their agreement to "adhere to
the rules for membership and fees" as these rules
will not exist at the beginning but only get created
after the ccSO's establishment. If applicants were
nevertheless required to comply with such not yet
existing rules most probably many ccTLD registries
would not apply for membership at all, at least not
initially.

Secondly, it should be made sure that the members of
the ccSO council will not be elected until the ccSO
has gained a sufficient number of members. Otherwise
it would have to be feared that just a few members
(or even just one member) that have been very fast
in joining the ccSO could alone determine the
council's composition. While this, at first sight,
might look like an incentive for ccTLD registries to
join as early as possible, it would certainly
backfire after the election as ccTLD registries
would then have significantly less reason to join.

To soften this problem, a timeline could be set
before which the council election cannot be held.
More sophisticated, however, would be some scaling
dependent on the number of ccSO members per
geographical region. So it could be defined, for
example, that the first council seat per region will
be filled by election for the first year of the ccSO's
existence (or the remainder of it) when at least 10
per cent of the ccTLD registries in this region have
joined the ccSO, that the second seat will be filled
for the first two years (or the remainder of them)
when membership in the concerned region has reached at
least 20 per cent, and that the election for the third
seat for the first three years (or the remainder of
them) requires membership of at least 30 per cent in
the region that the seat relates to. To make sure that
lack of membership interest in the ccSO does not prevent
council seats from being filled within a reasonable
period of time (or at all), it should additionally be
determined that a year after the ccSO's establishment
an election will be held for all still vacant council
seats regardless of the percentage of membership reached
at that time.

Stephan Welzel
Attorney-at-Law
Head of Legal Department
DENIC eG